


how can you take your heart out of this? (how do you stop once you've started?)

by ultranos



Series: salt and ashes [4]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 100 Year War (Avatar TV), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, violence based on historical context
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultranos/pseuds/ultranos
Summary: "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."  Lao Beifong knows this.
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Toph Beifong's Parents
Series: salt and ashes [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1845337
Comments: 33
Kudos: 288





	how can you take your heart out of this? (how do you stop once you've started?)

**Author's Note:**

> Part of _salt and ashes_. A slightly alternate character interpretation of the Parents Beifong.

In the eighty-eighth year of the war, as spring turned to summer, the first child of the next generation of Beifongs was born at the estate in Gaoling.

It had been a hard pregnancy, the midwife said. As was tradition, Lao has been banished from the room, trusting that his wife and child are in capable hands. Instead, he paces outside the birthing room, wondering at the child who will be.

This is not a happy world to bring a child into. He is a trader, a merchant. He always could see more than others could, and he cannot deny the stark truth that whispers on the winds on cold nights: the Fire is coming. Beyond the walls of this estate, beyond the watchtowers of Gaoling, across the leagues that separate them from Ba Sing Se, the Fire Nation marches, fed by the flames of the Fire Lord's ambitions.

A sharp cry pierces the air from the birthing room. He stops his restless pacing, and closes his eyes. He is a father now. He stands before the doors to the room and waits.

He does not have to wait long. One of the midwife's assistants exits the room. He can see his wife on the bed from the door, tired and flushed, but smiling. "My lord, you have a daughter."

A daughter. Not a son. A son would have been able to carry on the name, carry the family and the past, into the future. In the Earth Kingdom, such distinctions matter. But the laws of the Fire Nation are not the laws of the Earth Kingdom. He must remember this.

One day, the great stone foundations of Gaoling will be scorched and blackened. And the Beifongs are Earth, and while Earth can weather Fire, eventually it can crack and fall away, and it is his duty, as family head, as first-born son, and husband, and father, to ensure that there will always be Beifongs.

His younger brother Xiang died on some far off battlefield, his bones ground to dust in the earth under the boots of the Fire Nation's armies.

The midwife stands before him, pale and flustered. She holds the child, wrapped in a soft, pale green blanket but howling in protest anyway, nervously. He is instantly on edge, because this woman is the best midwife in Gaoling, the best money can buy, and if she is shaken, something must be dire indeed.

"My lord, I am sorry, but your daughter...she is blind."

The words pass through him, striking him to the core. Blind. Numbly, he holds out his arms and accepts the crying bundle from the midwife. He looks down, taking in the soft tuft of ink-black hair, the bunched-up red face. He rocks her slowly, and the child hiccups a bit, and when she opens her eyes, he sees that, yes, she is indeed blind. Something clenches around his heart.

He had cousins once. Young men, boys really, who marched out to do their duty for the Earth King on his throne in the Impenetrable City, to protect and honor their family and ancestors in Gaoling. For almost one hundred years, Earth Kingdom boys, and talented girls, went off to die for some lord's ambitions. In his mind's eye, he imagines a boy with Poppy's eyes and his face. A boy with Xiang's lopsided grin, a boy who would die in flames and smoke as he did his duty and stood before the Fire Lord's endless army.

When Lao Beifong holds his daughter for the first time, blind and squalling like Huánglóng himself, he is glad she is not his son.

\---

When Lao was a young man, he was rash and wild in the ways all young men are when they have money in their pockets and the invincibility from drink in their bellies. He sailed on his father's merchant ships with the knowledge that one day they would be his own as he made himself a name in every port. He ran and competed with the other young scions of merchant families, games of dice and chance instead of the careful plotting of their fathers.

It was all in the name of making business alliances, because merchants were a breed apart from the scholars and the nobles. There is benefit in being seen as the scum-suckers, slip-sliding in and out of ports. The nobles and scholars in their houses furnished with ostentatious displays of their wealth, draped in tapestries from the Earth Kingdoms and pottery from the Fire Nation, turned up their noses at dealing with the merchants, but would never dream of not making the deals.

Hypocrites, the lot of them, but useful in their own way. In the taverns and gambling dens of countless ports, Lao learned his lessons well. 

"In the field of commerce, there are rhythms of becoming rich and rhythms of losing one's fortune. Harmony and disharmony in rhythm occur in every walk of life. It is imperative to distinguish carefully between the rhythms of flourishing and the rhythms of decline in every single thing," his father would say, reciting lessons learned from his father and his father before him. The words carried in the blood so long it might as well have been carved in Earth.

He also remembers the other words, the truth of them burning in his father’s eyes, warning for caution, for patience. “Coming up against corners means that when you push something that is strong, it hardly gives way immediately, just like that.” Do not think that just because Earth holds against the flames that they will hold forever.

He knows now: this will end in Fire.

Now, he meets with Tetsuya in a port. The two men stand aside as they watch dockworkers load up Tetsuya's ship. Lao idly wonders at his web of trade and if trading Earth Kingdom goods to the Fire Nation in order to have the money to keep the war effort going and the Earth Kingdom forces in supply counts as treason.

"My boy will love the model ship you sent, Lao." Tetsuya nods as he talks. "He'll be five next month."

"That old already? I remember when he was born," Lao murmurs, thinking of small hands wrapping around his finger, trying to determine the shape of him, of small heads asleep on his shoulder, soft hair tickling his cheeks.

He will never have another child. The healers said Poppy could not survive another pregnancy. Toph is all he has, his only legacy to the future. A future draped in red and wreathed in smoke.

He wishes he could give her better.

"Your wife was pregnant, wasn't she? If you had a daughter, maybe we could...arrange something." Tetsuya is brushing his nails against his shirt idly. "An alliance would benefit the both of us."

Lao's mind goes blank.

He sees his daughter, pale and drawn, grown but broken, drifting in and out of rooms decorated with baubles of the Fire Nation. In his mind, he watches his legacy, his blood, hundreds of years of history, brought crashing down without a sound, as she turns away from a bedroom door, while sounds of male and female pleasure reverberate through the stones themselves.

Something inside Lao snaps.

No daughter of the Beifongs, no daughter of _Lao Beifong_ will be a cuckold wife or bedwarmer for some second-rate Fire Nation whelp.

So he folds his mouth into a frown and lies. "The child was born dead. I have no daughter."

\---

Everything changes when Toph is two years old.

He is walking in the garden, enjoying a rare moment of peace. The sun shines upon his brow, and if he closes his eyes, he thinks he can almost forget the truth that there is war knocking on their doors. Here, in this garden, where his daughter plays safely, where she can grow up a normal child, here there can be peace. This is all he wants. He hears childish laughter like bells and he smiles as he turns the corner to where he knows his daughter is.

His blood turns to ice in his veins.

There Toph sits on the sandy ground at the edge of the koi pond, slapping the ground with her tiny hands. He could see the fish nibbling at her toes, but that was not the source of his fear. No, every time Toph slaps the ground with glee, because the fish are tickling her feet, sand becomes rock and the earth _cracks_ and shatters, and Lao feels the world tilt underneath him.

 _Earthbender_.

Two strides, and Lao scoops up his small daughter, who waves her hands around frantically until she finds his nose and mouth. Her hands still when they reach his cheeks, and it is the look of puzzlement that crosses her features that make him realize he is crying.

"Bàba?"

"It's nothing, Toph. It's nothing."

That night, he dreams.

\---

_He is in a Fire Nation port, one he hasn't been in since he was a young man. He remembers this place. This is the place his fears were born. It is that day again._

_There's a crowd already in the market square. He sees the cast-iron pot already on the piles of wood, eagerly awaiting whatever poor soul the Fire Lord deemed too dangerous to live. What Earthbender got himself caught and damned?_

_He hears the clap of boots against the stone as soldiers file into the square. A squad fills the pot with oil as the crowd roars its approval. Somehow, he finds himself in front._

_The roar of the crowd grows even fiercer, baying for the death of one they saw as less than a dog. He hears the clank of chains, the shink-hiss of metal scraping against stone._

_Sound falls away as Lao sees the condemned fall into the circle of death._

_She looks so small, iron manacles circling thin wrists and ankles, chains as thick as two of his fingers linking them together. Her hair is dark, messy, and greasy. Her knuckles and knees are bleeding freely. Her face is dirty, and this cannot be happening. He tries to take a step, and finds he cannot move. Spirits, no. No no nononono..._

_Lao watches as Fire Nation soldiers drag his daughter to the pot that's as big as she is. She cannot be more than fifteen years old, and the soldiers grab her by the scruff of her shirt and throw her into the oil._

_The firebenders move, and the pyre is alight._

_Toph screams._

_Lao still cannot move. He strains against whatever holds him fast to the earth._

_Toph's blind eyes lock onto his own. Beseeching, knowing, pleading._

_"Bàba, please!"_

_Lao howls his frustration, his rage, his sorrow. He cannot move._

_"Bàba!"_

"NO!"

Lao jackknifes in bed, panting and sweating in terror.

"Lao?" Poppy mumbles sleepily by his side. "What's wrong?"

He stumbles out of bed, still shaking. "Nothing. I...I need to check something. Go back to sleep."

He does not wait for confirmation, nearly tripping out the door in his rush. He skids down the hallway, sliding on the polished wooden floors, not caring, not until he reaches his destination.

Toph is asleep in her bed, small chest rising and falling softly. Lao collapses against the side of the bed, letting his finger brush away soft, black locks away from her face. Toph scrunches her nose as the hair tickles her face, but settles when he continues to stroke her face.

His daughter is a prodigy, has the capability of being one of the most powerful Earthbenders in the world, because power like that always manifests early. Rumors of the Fire Lord's grandchild reach even the ears of the Earth Kingdom. Firebender at two years old, and in that child's toddling steps, the march of inevitability seems even louder.

And his Toph, his precious child, is now right in the middle.

The Earth Kingdom needs powerful benders. His duty to his kingdom says he should prepare his child for war, for the battlefield where her talent will be of most use, to the walls of Ba Sing Se where so many have thrown their lives, only to be dashed to pieces against the great stone walls or burned to ashes by the all-consuming flames. The Earth Kingdom needs powerful benders to win this war, because there is no other option.

The Beifong family needs a legacy. His duty to his family is to protect them, ensure that they survive and prosper. And that means stifling this talent, crippling his child more because if she is weak, if she is soft, if she is caged and swaddled, then she will survive. She will survive if she is the antithesis of everything Lao holds dear, because there is no other option.

Does he sacrifice his family's future for the Earth Kingdom, or does he sacrifice Toph's potential, her strength, her respect? Which duty trumps?

He brushes her hair away from her face again. In his ears echo the easy laughter from years gone by. He sees Xiang turn around and grin, crooked and toothy, at him one last time before walking out the front gates, never to return.

Lao Beifong puts his face in his hands and weeps.

\---

And he sees her now, like it is the first time he ever saw her. A girl with Poppy's eyes and his jaw. A girl with Xiang's lopsided grin who can bend the earth to her will to fight grown men, and he realizes now that all his efforts have been for naught. The Exile is here, and she is calling her to that far-off battlefield, where the wandering souls and wild ghosts tread among the bleached bones and ash.

When she stands before him, spine like iron, stubborn as stone, the words that she speaks echo like funeral bells in his heart. And when she speaks of helping the Exile, helping end this long war, he hears the language of _duty_ , he smells phantom smoke and whisper-screams assault his ears.

_Bàba, please!_

War is always about sacrifice.

And Lao does not want to let her go. He would take her anger, her hate. He thinks he would gladly bear the weight of his only child loathing his existence, if it means she were alive to do so.

“Bàba, please.”

Two words undo him. 

He has always known that losing her would break him like nothing else could. What he did not know was that he could lose her in an entirely different way, not to hatred but to indifference. To stay would be to drain the life out of her, the ghost he never wants to birth.

He looks at his daughter, this small girl he cradled in his hands because she is more precious to him than all the gold and silk in the world, and looks at the ghosts that stand behind her. 

Beifongs are of Earth. Earth does not bend. Earth is stubborn and solid and unyielding. Lao is one man, and when Earth decides to move, it shakes the foundations of the world.

“Very well, Toph.”

Toph is, as in all things, the best of them.

Lao Beifong bends his lips into a smile, and bows to the inevitable.

—-

In the ninety-seventh year of the war, in an unassuming port town in the Earth Kingdom, the first child of the next generation of Beifongs planted her feet into the Earth and swore that Earth would outlast Fire. Lao Beifong heard this and remembers his duty is to ensure that there will always be Beifongs.

His family cannot live in ashes. And so he lets her go.

“Tell me, Dragon of the West: am I making the correct decision? I have chosen battles for so long, against all sides. I’ve stood against them all for so long. Tell me if I am making a mistake in falling now.”

The man next to him turns, a man more legend than human, the Devil of Ba Sing Se, the man who has ended hundreds of lives of his countrymen with his own hands and thousands more with his words. This man turns and considers him, and though Lao is only a man, he stares him in the eyes and demands an answer.

The Dragon turns his golden gaze away first. “I do not know. I very much hope you are not.”

That is not the answer he wished he would get, but his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of childish laughter. Lao looks and sees Toph laughing as she stands in the middle of the street, her arm slung across the shoulders of the Exile. The Exile, who is also just a little girl with Fire Nation coloring, is laughing quietly along with his daughter.

There is a gasp next to him. Lao turns and stops, struck dumb, because the Dragon of the West stares at the two children with tears rolling down his cheeks. “I don’t think I ever heard her laugh before.”

How many generations of their children have been fed to the flames? How many of their bones lie forgotten in the dirt and dust? How many sons and daughters, Fire and Earth both, have had their laughter turn to ash and dust on the wind?

How many more can they stand to lose?

He wished he could give Toph better. Perhaps it is time to stop wishing.

Lao bows in thanks to the man next to him. For he too is just a man, for all his titles and destruction in his wake, just a man who also wants better for a child in his care. “I have my answer, then.”

The man known as the Dragon of the West considers him once more. Lao simply smiles, and the man chuckles. “You are an interesting man, Lao Beifong. I should think I would like to test my wits against yours one day.” He smiles before offering a bow of his own, placing something in Lao’s hand, and walking off.

Lao watches him go, then looks down at the white lotus tile in his palm.


End file.
